Bodark Creek - 60. Chapter 60

Sometimes things happen that seem so far away from you that you can only imagine they’re happening to somebody else. So many people in my life had died, but that seemed natural because so many of them had lived for so long. It was the accidents that got me worst. My daughter Patricia’s and her husband Eddie’s, and Joann’s second husband, Rod’s. And my grandson Paul’s.

Paul had such a good life. He had a good job, and he and his wife Cara were having so much fun that Paul’s mother, Joann, would tease them that it was time to stop thinking about themselves and have children. Paul would just say, “All right, Mama,” and then he and Cara would fly off to Utah to go skiing. Or they’d go to some island that I had to look for on a map, and they’d spend a week swimming underwater. Or they’d go to Europe or Australia.

“You’ve been to some of these places, Grandma,” Paul would say. “We just didn’t have to wait as long.”

I didn’t tell him that I was having children at the age when he and Cara were traveling. And I didn’t say that I didn’t have a lot of choices besides working on the farm. I was happy doing that, and I loved raising my children, even if I was lonely during my first year. Instead, I took the easy way and let Joann tell Paul and Cara some of the things I might have been thinking. That way I always stayed on their good sides. Though sometimes I tried to soften Joann, too.

“For someone who didn’t want to be a grandmother,” I teased her, “you certainly want Paul and Cara to have kids.”

“It’s past their time,” she simply replied. “They’re both already thirty.”

“They can wait another few years,” I pointed out. “My daddy was still having children when he was fifty.”

I knew she was tired of hearing that, but I couldn’t stop saying it. And she always had an answer.

“Grandma – your mama -- was younger than grandpa, and that makes all the difference. And things were simpler then.”

“You only think so,” I reminded her. “You saw how many babies were buried in Hattiesburg. And you know that half my brothers and sisters didn’t live to see fifteen.”

“I know, Mama. But still...”

And maybe it would have taken my own mama’s pretend accident, the one with the elevator that “sent Billie and Mary straight to Heaven,” to match what happened to Paul. He was an electrician. He’d gone from training in a company, to working for it, to being part owner.

“He really knows what he’s doing,” Cara said. “For everything I tell him about business, he shows me a new way to use it.”

“I don’t want to be crawling through people’s attics all my life,” Paul joked. “That’s fine now, but I like the larger jobs we’re getting even more. And I want to be finding those jobs for us by the time I’m forty.”

“Will your boss let you?” I asked.

Paul laughed. “In another ten years, Chuck’ll be ready to be bought out. He and his wife have this place they like in North Carolina. And ten years after that, I’ll be ready to sell.”

It all sounded good, and it all sounded possible. And even if I didn’t think I’d live to see another twenty years, I wasn’t worried about Paul and Cara. Then came his accident.

He was at work. “It was an ordinary job in a cellar,” Cara explained when we were spending those first days in the hospital. “He was opening an old fuse box, and all he had to do was replace some wires. But something went wrong. Something grounded something else. I don’t understand it all. But the old fuses exploded, and they blew up in his face.”

Almost by miracle, the first thing Paul did was throw his arm across his eyes. “He’d be blind now if he hadn’t done that,” Cara told us. Paul wasn’t blind, but there wasn’t a lot left of his face.

The first thing the doctors worried about was whether he was going to live. They weren’t sure if there was damage to his brain or if the shock would just be too much. That was the first three days of waiting, until Paul’s condition moved from critical to stable. And still almost no one in our family could see him. His head was completely bandaged, and his arm was bandaged, and he was breathing and being fed through tubes.

Cara had been in his room. She’d held his unbandaged hand and said it was warm, but that it was like he was completely asleep. “He didn’t know I was there. Between the drugs and the noise from all the machines, I could have been invisible.”

The doctors kept telling us to go home. We knew some of the nurses, and they told us the same thing. “We’ll call you,” they assured us. “Just go and take care of yourselves.”

“At least, you don’t have to be here,” Joann said.

“I want to,” I told her. “It’s not that I can keep him alive just by waiting. But if something bad happens, and I never get a chance to see him, I could never live with that.”

Of course, we all wanted someone to promise that nothing worse was going to happen. But no one ever did.

Though after a week, we started to wait at Leona’s house. It was the closest to the hospital. But there was little we could do besides pray and wait for the phone to ring.

Then came months of recovery. And surgery. And more surgery. And more. There were skin grafts and weeks of waiting to see if they would hold. Then there were more grafts. By this time, Paul was in and out of our hospital, and the one in Dallas, and he was breathing and eating on his own. But we never saw his face. The bandages gradually got smaller, and his hair grew back. And his arm healed, and there was no real damage to how it worked. But it’s one thing for your arm to look bad. People don’t look at that first. And even though Paul’s eyes were fine, and we could always see them, no one had any idea how the rest of his face would look.

There was scarring and rawness for a long time. But slowly we got to see his forehead again, and then his ears. For months after that, he looked like he was a bank robber, with everything below his eyes covered by bandages. He couldn’t really talk, and during the first months his writing arm was still damaged. He learned to write a little with his left hand, and Cara bought him the first home computer I ever saw. With that, Paul could pick out easy sentences. But he must have been pretty lonely, and mostly, he didn’t want to be with anyone but Cara.

“He loves you all,” she told us. “He’s just not comfortable seeing people much.”

It was over a year before that changed. A lot of the damage had healed, but Paul still wore a surgical mask. His mouth wasn’t right, and that was most important. “And he has to learn to talk again,” Cara said. “Every time they do surgery, it changes everything.”

He was still in pain. And he was taking a lot of drugs that he didn’t like. Before the accident, Paul didn’t even like taking aspirin, and now there was a whole shelf of medicine keeping him alive.

“There’s always the danger of infection,” Cara explained. “And he can’t go out in the sun. And even though he seems all right, we can never tell if something will happen.”

But nothing did, and slowly Paul healed. There were more operations, and some of the bandages came back for a while. And when they were finally gone, he looked presentable but never looked the same. The old Paul was a handsome boy. Now, he was a good-looking man.

“Well, I am almost four years older,” he told us. “I couldn’t stay a kid forever.”

“You were doing a pretty good job,” Neal joked.

“I was,” Paul admitted, and he started to grin. But that didn’t come as easily as it used to, so he quit. “You just can’t believe how many muscles there are in a person’s face,” he explained. “And how long they take to fix. I guess I’ll be okay again by the time I’m grandma’s age.”

By that point, we were all just happy he was going to have that chance.